My Favorite Stack

Why I switched to Dyment's DAO stack...

When I got back into magic as a hobby after a 30+ year hiatus, I decided to focus on mentalism and went looking through the three boxes of props and books that I’d carted along over the years for anything in that realm. I pulled out Richard Osterlind’s Breakthrough Card System that I’d never really learned and decided to “get good” at it.

Discovering the “behind the scenes” info that allowed the stack to work was inspirational — I can only imagine how Osterlind felt when the pieces fell into place and he had the complete system.

Spoiler alert: I ended up switching away from BCS for one reason I’ll talk about later, but I have nothing but respect for the BCS system. For some it’s the perfect stack.

I don’t remember exactly how long it took me to learn the stack, but pretty soon every deck of cards in the house was in BCS order. I could pick up any deck, cut it, and tell what the top card was. But I wasn’t all that fast at it, so I took a deck of cards to work with me and set it on my desk. I’m a computer programmer so there are times when I have to “build or compile” whatever I’m working on and that takes anywhere from 15 seconds to maybe a minute, and during those times I’d cut the deck, figure out the top card, cut again, etc., until that computer operation was done.

And it worked — with that extra daily practice I got pretty fast at decoding BCS. (The other thing I did, because of being a programmer, was to create an online BCS tester so I could practice even without a deck of cards handy.)

I was finally fast enough that I could do a “card calling” routine — (false) shuffle the deck, have someone cut it and take out a packet of cards and look at them, and one by one I could read their mind and tell what cards they had chosen.

But, as I was just getting back into the performing world, I had no place to show off. Living in Alaska at the time, there weren’t even any magic clubs (at least, not that I was aware of) to practice on real people with. So I put it aside for a while…

A year later I had need of it and went back to “brush off the rust” and I had no clue how it worked, I had to dig the book out again and relearn it. Yes, it was faster this time, but still took a while before I was fast enough to perform it.

And then it happened again — moving out of Alaska, getting set up in a new job, etc., had me putting aside all my hobby stuff. And when I went back to it, again I couldn’t remember how to do BCS!

This time, instead of relearning it, I did a bit of googling and found some information on the DAO stack, by Doug Dyment. (He’s the D in the name, Mick Ayers is the A, and Richard Osterlind is the O — they all contributed to the DAO stack in one way or another.)

The DAO Stack

I bought Dyment’s book Tricyclic which included the DAO stack and learned it really quickly. And then got faster at it much more quickly than when I’d been practicing BCS. That could be at least partly due to my brain being familiar with “stack math” but it was mainly due to a much lower complexity with DAO.

I did the same thing with DAO that I did with BCS — wrote an online tester and kept a deck of cards on my desk at work. And after I’d gotten good at it, the same thing happened — for close to a year I didn’t do anything with it and forgot how to decode the stack!

But the difference with DAO and BCS was that with the former I picked up Tricyclic, looked at the two rules, and it all came flooding back. Within a day I was back up to speed. It’s so straight-forward that I don’t have to worry about “losing it” if I don’t use it for a few months.

At some point in the past couple years I heard so much about using a memorized deck that I decided to memorize the DAO stack so I pounded on that for a couple months — and then decided that I didn’t care about doing card tricks enough to keep up with that. As a mentalist I’m not opposed to using playing cards if I need to, but they’re certainly not a “must have” in my world. So I do card calling with the DAO stack every once in a while and call it good.

Finally

If you know BCS and are happy with it, you have no reason to switch. But if you’re looking for a stack that’s easy to get into and looks very random, take a look at Doug Dyment’s DAO Stack. While Tricyclic is now out of print, Dyment has covered it in his book Calculated Thoughts (along with a billion other things).